Sean and Joe were talking on IRC about Steve Yegge’s post on Steve Yegge’s 10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs. He had me at #1. Seriously, the most important thing to me on his post was how to swap caps and control on XP.

Even though I currently prefer Xemacs, most of the items still apply. Actually, many of the suggestions I was already doing. (I have to thank Dave Dribin, my xemacs mentor, for that.) The few I wasn’t that I thought were sane I added, like removing the menubar I never use and the scrollbar I so rarely use as to be never.

Here’s a few of my Xemacs suggestions:

;;; Remove "XEmacs:" from the modeline as it annoys me
(setq-default modeline-buffer-identification
	      (list (cons modeline-buffer-id-left-extent "")
		    (cons modeline-buffer-id-right-extent "%17b")))

I got this one from an emacs HOWTO somewhere. I find it very useful, especially in e-mail.

;;; Make highlighted regions act like a word processor.
;;; i.e. select a region, the region is then overwritten
(cond
 ((fboundp 'turn-on-pending-delete)
  (turn-on-pending-delete))
 ((fboundp 'pending-delete-on)
  (pending-delete-on t)))

Here’s a quick translation of Steve’s Item #7 to xemacs:

(set-specifier menubar-visible-p nil)
(custom-set-variables
 '(toolbar-visible-p nil)
 '(scrollbars-visible-p nil))

A question I have to ask myself, is now that I’ve removed all that, why am I still using xemacs over regular emacs. I need to think about this. Something in the back of my brain is saying that mouse wheel support and a few other things were better when I started out. Fedora Core 4 doesn’t ship with xemacs anymore (but its in extras) so I might have to give emacs a try again.